Inkwells & Keystrokes

A perfect example of what I like to find and to showcase here in this blog: “DC One Web Day.” I came across it on one of my listservs; to find and join, search “DC One Web Day” on Facebook. One of the founders, Nathaniel James, describes it this way:

This year's OWD theme is democratic participation online.  As many of you know, the
DC planning committee has decided to move forward with Laura Hertzfeld's great of
idea of launching an "E-Democracy Time Capsule," using Web 2.0 technologies (a wiki
and/or blog) to host a virtual archive where anyone can post  the best examples of
online political participation to date.

Did you ever hear the expression, “I would love to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting?” Well, no need to give up your species if it was one of these meetings.

These are innovative educational projects, which means that people are trying things without budgets working on the energy of their own convictions. I wonder if they realized that these would be there for all to see. I know I attended a meeting in which I was gawking too close to my camera and generally looking goofy. I will make sure I am spiffed up next time.

Check out the topics. If you wade past the “Okay, testing mikes…where is …” stuff, you can learn not only about the projects themselves, but about how people work. As for flashmeeting, it works really well, from my experience.

Buzz words provide nice crutches so we don’t have to say the hard stuff in awkward professional conversations; they take the edge off. Understanding buzz words shows you are in the club. As obnoxious as they are, as much as I love to hate them, they make me smile. Who cares that they don’t really mean anything?

Recently, the BBC offered the top 50 examples of office speak “you love to hate.” From that list, my hat tips to Timothy Denton:

“Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I’m afraid we’re stuck with biz-speak.”
Timothy Denton, New York

While office workers may be serial offenders in the buzz word category, they may have learned the art in school. An Australian article shows schools may be responsible for English jargon:

Tony Thompson asks, “Have We Learned Our Lesson Yet,” as he discusses why Australia has a looming teachers shortage. I had to look twice when I first clicked on the article, because the list of problems sounds so much like those in the US.

I could be the assistant manager of a retail operation and make more money but it is clear that I have a sentence to serve. And I will serve this sentence by listening to education gurus tell me that my style of teaching is wrong and that I have to change. My lessons are not “inclusive” enough. I need to give the students more “ownership” of the process. My knowledge of my subject can impede student learning. They must be challenged to seek out information on their own. God forbid that I answer a question. I need to be a guide, not a sage. I should use “scaffolding”. I still don’t know what this means.

It may mean we should use “real world learning ” (not that fake stuff.)

I have been working on a project for months. I needed an idea, then I made a plan, then presented the things about a dozen times to different potential stakeholders, then wrote letters for funding, then actually got some funding, then ran into technical glitches, then ran into more technical glitches, then heard nothing for a week, then hit a big ole set back, and then tonight it worked.

I am overcome with giddy project glee. I am not sure whether the final open door was the result of luck, timing, luck and timing, or hard work or hardwork and luck and timing. But I don’t care right now. It finally worked. And I am basking in glee.

Brazil released pictures of an “uncontacted” tribe on its border with Peru. Imagine what that means, to be “uncontacted”? Your entire world is known and is finite, albeit filled with predators and evils spirits and all. The pictures showed these poor tribesmen looking up at whatever plane or helicopter hovered above them taking pictures. Their gut response was to defend themselves apparently because they seem to have some sort of weapon pointed back at the camera. That says something to me. They really had no reason I can think of to fear helicopters, if they are indeed uncontacted. But the sight of something big and bright and new up in the sky turns on an instinctive response in human beings to fight.

I had the kind of week at work that makes me think that mankind has not moved beyond  that instinct: bright, shiny and new - bad. The irony is that my bright and shiny and new thing is about history and man and what has he learned anyway presented in a terribly contacted way: history alive in a virtual world. “Stepping into History: Experiencing the Past Through Virtual Worlds” may give me clues about man’s instinctive responses. I think I will sign up. Will its lessons teach me that the tribe is right: when you see someone new, run? That theory sure doesn’t work when you are the new guy.

In 1972, as a student at the University of Massachusetts, I applied for an internship in Washington DC.  Since I was a business major, I thought I wanted to work in consumer affairs. Working with my Democratic US Sentaor’s office, the University office in charge of arranging internships guided me through the process of applying for and receiving an internship for the Republican President’s Advisor for Consumer Affairs, one Virginia Knauer. I left for DC just after Christmas, moving into an apartment at 16th and P NW, only 16 blocks straight down the street from the White House.

Little did I know that I would outlast the President in Washington that year: I delivered press releases from Ms. Knauer with a friend from the office to the Washington Post in August the night Nixon resigned.

At 20, I really didn’t understand everything that I saw or did during that time. My experiences included covering hearings on the Hill, researching hundreds of consumer complaints, writing letters, preparing background briefs, and taking Ms. Knauer’s young relative on a tour of the city (the little girl had been many places “less boring” than the Smithsonian, she said.)  Ms. Knauer did not ignore my office efforts, however; she once even took me to lunch in the White House and I still have the menu to prove it. I was hired in her office after my internship and only left to return to finish my degree.

The experience was invaluable for the rest of my life. There is no working situation that daunted me since. There is no person who can impress me to speechlessness after that time. Since then I spent my career in regional journalism, business consulting and education. I wrote for ten years and am actively writing part time now. I have had over 2,000 students from adults to young children. While the impact on my life will not make the list of Ted Kennedy’s accomplishments, his office connected an independent voter with a Republican office for an experience that helped me become a productive citizen.

I wish Senator Kennedy a miraculous recovery.

Writing is hard enough, but writing to sound like someone else really takes concentration. I was asked to write a blog entry for an international group and I found myself holding back, re-phrasing, perhaps struggling because I knew other people would hold me accountable.

My post is not through the approval yet, but when it does, I will be relieved.

So when my son told me he had gotten me a book by Roy Peter Clark for Mother’s Day, I was ecstatic. No matter how much you write, you will benefit from his tools.

Every time Beth tagged a great link for me on del.icio.us I wanted to thank her or comment. That thought hung around my head for a while, until I found diigo.com through a twitter.com post. I installed the diigo toolbar, but since I only have one other person using it with me so far, it isn’t as much fun as I had hoped. I imagined that the knowledge benefit from social networking with bookmarks would grow exponentially with the extra capabilities of notes and highlighting that diigo offers.

Then Beth sent me lumifi.com, which alleges that it reads the results for me and selects the relevant parts. This is the part that has me concerned. Do I really want to let this thing do my research for me? How much will it cull out or leave in? Sorting through piles of results means man is required to think. Sorting through piles of results often tempts me down paths of distraction. I am concerned but will investigate.

I am trying to decide if I should download The Brain. It is available for PC, Mac and Linux, lest you wonder. It sounds great, but the fact that it “Enables you to link items associatively” frightens me a bit. Choosing a focus and sticking with it has always been a bit of a challenge for me. What if I see more permutations of what is possible?!! The way I even found The Brain makes me wonder if I should be aloud to have it. Someone started following me on Twitter. I checked out their Twitter page which led to their blog which mentioned The Brain which led me to be tempted by the free download. All in seconds. And what I was supposed to be doing was…naturally, something else.

On April 6, 2008, The Boston Globe ran an article called “House of Cards” by Dale Bennett. Bennett interviewed the people whose lives and experiences counting cards in Las Vegas were the story behind the book Bringing Down the House, a work of alleged creative nonfiction. Unfortunately, much of it just wasn’t true at all. The lack of truth in that book is apparently a problem with many books in the creative nonfiction genre.

Bennett writes, “Editors and industry analysts say that with sales of fiction flagging, book publishers are pressured toward the genre of dramatic nonfiction. Much like reality television shows, the shift is fed by the sense that what audiences want is reality, but packaged with an excitement and drama that the original facts lack.” Hmm, if facts are lacking, then the work is not true, hence it is fiction.

Creative nonfiction is not without its standards, one of which is “never invent or change facts or events.” The genre has its own dot org with a definition:

Although it sounds a bit affected and presumptuous, “creative nonfiction” precisely describes what the form is all about. The word “creative” refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.

Can facts be made accessible in honest prose? Professional writers should be able to accomplish that without ruining an innocent genre at the expense of a useful word: non, as in nonfiction.

Perhaps the writers are not the only ones with a misunderstanding of creative nonfiction. According to Will Fitzhugh, founder and president of The Concord Review, an organization that “recognize[s] and …publish[es] exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world,” creative nonfiction is a poor substitute for academic writing that he believes students should be doing in school. Does he also misinterpret rambling teen angst as creative nonfiction? Or maybe it is something else.  Because he recognizes that colleges are willing to accept creative non fiction as writing samples and because schools supposedly use the genre to teach writing, the quality of writing is apparently suffering, Fitzhugh seems to believe.

My thoughts are these:

• much of what is passing as creative non fiction is just fiction
• students do write best when they are writing about themselves but should also be trained to write the kinds of academic writing Fitzhugh promotes
• what is at stake is respect for truth

The hard fact is that students need rigorous exercise in academic and creative writing. They need training in effective word choice, in sentence structure, thesis writing and content development. They need to write often and discuss often. The National Assessment of Educational Progress had discouraging reports again this year. According to the New York Times, “James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about what he called ‘the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence,’ because young Americans are doing most of
their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.”

My call is to demand that students practice and that they tell the truth. Setting those two simple standards for their writing will raise the bar in remarkable ways that will make their nonfiction, whether personal or academic, worth reading.